HP-UX 11i Release Notes (December 2000)

Programming
Libraries
Chapter 13 265
Details of Linker Changes
Incremental linking: Incremental linking provides significant linktime
improvements for compile-link-debug development cycles by processing
only those input files that are actually modified between cycles. Files
that are not modified do not need to be reprocessed. For large
application, incremental linking may provide up to 10x and sometimes
greater improvements in linktime.
Unix 98: Support for the APIs dlopen, dlsym, dlerror and dlclose is
added for 32-bit programs.
Filtered Libraries: Filtered shared libraries divide up a large library into
one filter and several implementation libraries. The user links against
the filter library, but the real definitions of data and functions actually
resides in the implementation libraries. At run time, only those
implementation libraries that are actually used are loaded. Filtered
libraries can be nested; an implementation library can itself be a filtered
library containing other implementation libraries.
GProf 32-bit support: GProf is an enhanced version of prof which
produces call graph over the input generated by prof. However, the
profiling of shared library was not supported in earlier releases. This
release will support profiling of shared libraries using the environmental
variable LD_PROFILE. No recompilation is required for profiling shared
libraries.
ldd32: List dynamic dependencies of incomplete executables files or
shared libraries support in dld.sl.
PLabel cache: +plabel_cache is added to 32-bit linker and dld.sl to
control the global symbol hash mechanism.
+objdebugonly : ld +objdebugonly in both 32-bit and 64-bit, to
ignore debug information from non-objdebug objects or archives and
proceed in +objdebug mode.
Other Issues
Various serious and critical defects were repaired.
Forward and backward compatibility are maintained. Use of new
features in this release may break backward compatibility.
Invoking chatr on some binaries built with an older linker may emit the
following message: chatr(error): dl_header_ext.size !=
sizeof(dl_header_ext). Please update your version of the